


Something is Wrong

by Sab



Category: The X-Files
Genre: (Uploaded by Punk), Angst, F/M, Late Night Paranoia, Mulder's Codependent, Unresolved Sexual Tension, life-or-death overdramatization
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1999-03-11
Updated: 1999-03-11
Packaged: 2017-11-29 23:25:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/692726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sab/pseuds/Sab
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He had fallen asleep, he must have, because now he was awake and it was dark and he was fairly sure it was still Wednesday and it was 9:44. (Uploaded by Punk, from The Sabrary.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something is Wrong

**Author's Note:**

> What we used to label A-for-angst back on atxc, lots of life-or-death overdramatization in pure X-Files fashion.
> 
> Another one from the wayback machine; old-school emo X-Files fic from my first days in the fandom. Presented intact and unedited for archival purposes and your potential diversion.

He awoke with a start and was sure he'd been asleep for days. His watch read 9:41, but it was dark outside and he wasn't sure if that meant 9:41 Wednesday night or 9:41 Thursday night or even 9:41 p.m. Friday. For a moment he was even sure it meant 9:41 Thursday morning, sure beyond question that the world had ended, the sun had sighed and yawned and said "screw these damned mortals, I'm going back to bed." A flash of apocalyptic panic and his blood ran cold.

He rubbed his eyes, sat up and wiggled the kinks out of his back and his brain settled on the decision that it was, in fact, still Wednesday, and that he'd been asleep for barely two hours. Everything ached. He knew without getting that up his refrigerator housed two jars of capers and three canisters of black-and-white film, so he ordered himself not to be hungry.

What had he been...

Oh. They had been at the lab, they had been looking at tissue samples from that boy in Nevada, Scully had been showing him the radiation traces...Scully. What had happened next? It was six, it was almost six, he remembered, and she had gone to move her car to avoid a ticket from the street cleaners. "Go home," she had told him. "I can finish up here." But he hadn't gone home, he had more questions, and he waited for her in the lab all white and formaldehyde-y for a half an hour, forty-five minutes, an hour. She hadn't returned.

He looked at his watch again: 9:43. What had happened next? He had gone home, feeling a little abandoned, he had called her but there was no answer. He had eaten some capers; they were terrible, he remembered, almost ashamed for even trying them, now. And then what had happened? He had fallen asleep, he must have, because now he was awake and it was dark and he was fairly sure it was still Wednesday and it was 9:44.

He reached for the phone, punched Scully's home number.

"Hi, this is Dana Scully..." her even tones on voicemail met him. He hung up, tried her cellular.

"The D.C. Cellular customer you are trying to reach has..." he hung up again.

Where was she? He wondered, half idle, half panicked. It was a week night, a "school night," he would have joked, and she was never out this late unless he dragged her somewhere, and even then she would groan about it. Where was she?

He tried the office, knowing she wouldn't be there. She wasn't. Flipping on the lamp he stared at the phone for a long moment, scrolling mentally through all the numbers he knew, waiting for the one that would tell him where his partner was.

He thought vaguely about calling in a missing person's report, but he knew they would laugh at him. He already had a reputation of alarmist, and calling in a partner who was three hours missing would only serve to credit his incredibility. But he was panicking, now.

Where was she? It was 9:46.

When she still wasn't answering at 10:20 he was ready to admit that this was officially weird. Even before he could stop himself he had punched in Margaret Scully's number, and he mentally rehearsed the question he would ask Scully's prone-to-paranoid mother. "No, Mrs. Scully, she's fine, I just needed to find her to tell her something," he figured was his best tactic. And as it turned out, it didn't matter. Margaret Scully wasn't home either. Mulder pushed himself to his feet and paced the length of his apartment, working out the details in his mind. She had gone to move the car and she had never come back to the lab. Her phone was off. Her mother was missing. Raking fingers through his hair Mulder furrowed his brow and ordered himself to think.

The case. Was there something about the case...? They had been investigating a boy from Nevada who had suddenly developed traits which seemed to imply radioactivity. Mulder suspected that the boy was a covert experiment gone awry; Scully insisted that he'd been too close to nuclear testing. Really, neither theory added up, but there was no evidence to support either of their assumptions so they continued to investigate the details. Maybe they had gotten too close, Mulder thought now, chewing his lip. Maybe it had been covert experimentation, maybe they were inches from learning something they weren't supposed to know.

Think! He ordered himself, getting frustrated now. Where was she, damn it? Why hadn't she come back to the lab? It wasn't like her to leave him like that, and it certainly wasn't like her to leave an investigation half-finished.

Then again, he argued, she had told him to go home; maybe she wasn't planning to come back. Maybe she'd gotten into her car and decided to go home and...but she wasn't home. Unless she'd turned her phone off. Or unless she was home, but couldn't get to the phone...

Pulling on jeans again and holstering his weapon, Mulder ran downstairs to his car.

"Hello!" he shouted at her door, pounding it with a fist. Nothing. He dug in his pocket for the key and swung the door open. The room was dark, still, no indications of a struggle or a break-in. No indications that Scully had been here at all.

"Hey!" he called out into the blackness. Nothing. "Scully?" he said, quieter this time, knowing he wouldn't get a response.

With almost complete certainty that he would find nothing, Mulder switched on every light and checked every room in the house. He found nothing. Somewhere between embarrassed and terrified, Mulder left the empty apartment, locking the door behind him. It was 11:21, he noted idly as he crossed the street to his car. It was snowing again.

It was snowing again, fat white warm-snow flakes pocked his windshield and he sat in the car in the dark, his keys in his lap.

Where was she? He was weak, now, he had no more leads. No more ideas. She had been taken from him before but he'd always known the cause, hell, more frequently than not he'd _been_ the cause, however unintentional on his part. But this time, this time...

It just wasn't adding up. He was cold now, in the dark, in the snow, in the night in the car on the street where Scully lived, on the street where Scully wasn't. Could it be this easy? She goes off to move her car for the street cleaners and that's it? He never sees her again? One last half-smile at him as she told him to go home, she would finish up, and then the door swings shut and then no more Scully?

His impotence made him furious. Think, Mulder! he ordered himself, but there was nowhere to go from here. He had followed the trail to its logical end, and he had no more hypotheses. If the men from Nevada had taken her she could be anywhere by now, and since he wasn't even certain there _were_ men from Nevada there was nothing he could do about it now. The trail was cold, the bloodhounds were whimpering to please curl up and go to sleep, now. In the cold, in the snow, in his car, Mulder hated himself. Always, there were clues. Always his odd little switchboard mind made the connections, the right connections, always he saw around the corners no one else could. But this time there was nothing, just that big empty blank, the weakness of this night alone, in the snow, without Scully.

Without Scully. It was snowing with commitment, now, his windshield a sheet of grey from the inside as he stared through at the amorphous haze from the streetlight. The window was cold to touch and he rolled it down a bit, letting the fold of snow at the top crumble into the car and melt in his lap. Crisp, brisk, official winter air slipped in through the crack and the temperature in the car dropped with record speed. Mulder shivered despite himself and looked up through the crack at Scully's building. It was 11:38. When she gets back, when I get her back this time I tell her everything, he promised himself, tapping his hands on the steering wheel and balling his fists for warmth. I'll tell her not to ever, ever scare me like this again, damn it, I'll tell her that it's not fair, it's not funny, it's thoroughly uncool to leave me alone in all this. Because I can't do it without you, Scully. And you know that and I know you know that but when you get back to me this time I will tell you in words because it's times like these, times when you're missing, and, oh, there have been far, far too many of them, when I realize how much this sucks. How much this hurts. How deep this throws me into the throes of impossible, how terrifying and dark and lonely everything becomes when I'm not secure in the knowledge that you're out there, too, somewhere, for me.

Mulder cupped his hands against his mouth and blew into them, hard. His knuckles were white, his fingers shaky against the cold. He squinted through the window again at Scully's house, at its still, quiet squat-ness, at the nothing silence of the semi-urban street now blurry under the blanket of snow.

There were sunflower seeds in the glove box, but they were cold and a little wet, a little too soggy to eat and all the good salt washed away. He squished one between his teeth missing the familiar crack-slip as the shell fell away and the seed slid onto his tongue. He pried the slimy shell-bit free and flicked it outside, then instantly regretted it.

Through the window he could see it, a black-grey spot on the otherwise untainted snow cover of the street. He opened the door and leaned out to fetch it and his keys slid from his lap and punched their image into the shallow snow. He retrieved them, tossed them onto the passenger's seat and plucked the seed shell from the ground too. He scraped it from his frozen fingers into the ashtray, pulled the door shut and shuddered, chilled to the bone.

Outside, the serene simple spread of snow was agitated now: a clover shape where his fingers had pinched up the seed shell, a narrow valley where the corner of his sleeve pulled back toward the car, miniature banks and dunes where his keys had blown the snow back with their weight as they clattered to the asphalt beneath. The tiny patch of ground was a mess. And there was no putting it back together; what was done, where snow is concerned, is done.

Mulder looked up at the sky where the snow was still falling, still dressing the car in white, and he begged for the moment when it would finally conceal the abberations in the street beside him and his sins would be forgiven. Where the hell was she? His partner, his only friend, and hell, sometimes he wasn't even sure she was that, but she was always there, always seven buttons away on the phone, seven numbers he knew like a code, like a cipher, like the map where the send button on his cellular was the X that marks the spot and the answers come, the reassurances come, those grateful awful science arguments come and everything falls into place.

And if she were gone the answers would go, too, the simple-crazy rightness of her science, her vocabulary which uttered with ease the questions he didn't even know he needed to ask. Gone as easily as moving her car for the street cleaners, his life spoiled as easily as the simple sheet of snow now incomplete with the flick of a seed shell, the tumble of keys. There was a hollow, without her, and if he got her back, this time, _when_ he got her back, he corrected himself, he would tell her. All of this. He would make her understand how much he needed her, in words he never thought he would use. Words he never realize he had to until now, in the snow, alone in front of her house, at 11:53 on a Wednesday night.

Lights! Car lights, twinned headlights cresting the hill behind him and he wasn't sure, for a moment, whether to drive off or to leap out of his car or to flick the safety on his gun. But they were getting closer, and yes, it was Scully's car, it was pulling up behind him, it was making a u-turn, it was parallel parking on the other side of the street.

Mulder flung the door open and bounded to it, crossing the slippery snow street in three strides. The headlights went off, the windshield wipers went off, the door opened.

Scully.

It took her a minute to register his presence but they were face to face, now, and she blinked up at him, puzzled.

"Scully!" he said, betraying all his relief.

"Mulder, are you okay?" she asked.

He paused for a moment, looked at her. Fat little perfect flakes of snow were hanging in her hair and her eyelashes were wet, her eyes wide like stars. He noticed, now, that she was dressed, she was dressed up, she was in something long and velvet, it appeared, a deep green color under a short black jacket with a matching velvet collar. The streetlamp shone off the folds in her dress and he could see the shape of her beneath it and it was all he could do to remain standing, gaping down at her. "Wow," he managed, swallowing hard.

She laughed, a real laugh, a rare Scully-laugh, and he eased a bit, smiled. "I just a, uh, I mean, you look, uh, wow, Scully," he said stupidly. "Mulder, what are you doing here?" she asked in a tone that forbade any further useless babbling on his part, a tone he knew too well.

"You didn't come back to the lab," he said. "I got worried."

"Mulder, that was six hours ago! I told you to go home!" Her eyes were wide. "Yeah, but I wanted to check something, and you were just moving your car, so I waited, and when you didn't come back I got scared." He chewed his words for a moment, thinking, looking at her. "Your, uh, your phone was off."

"I turned it off," she said matter-of-factly. "I was late; I didn't realize how late it was until I got in the car, so I just left from there to come home and get changed for the-" Scully pursed her lips, exhaled through her nose. "Mulder, how long have you been waiting here?" Mulder looked at his watch. Two till midnight. "I don't know, a half an hour?"

"Mulder, it's freezing," she said, turning a gloved palm toward the sky and catching a snowflake. "What do you want?"

When she comes back to me I'll tell her everything, he remembered. He took a step back, allowed her image to overwhelm him in all her tiny, fiery splendour. She was magnificent, here in the dark, in the night, in the snow, blinking up at him with that twisted smile of amused disdain, and he was overcome.

"Can I talk to you for a minute?" he asked, his lungs swelling in that winter air.

She grit her teeth for a moment. "Mulder, it's almost midn - okay," she sighed. "Come inside. I'm freezing."

"Okay," he said.

He followed her up the stairs, watched her turn the key in the lock with frozen fingers like it was a scene caught on tape, like he was someone else watching this journey-to-tryst, like this night was too good to be his. He swelled with relief at her return, he wanted to skip giddily, he wanted to shout or yodel or holler lines of poetry to the heavens, but it was late and neighbors were sleeping, and he was too cold and too stiff to skip, and he didn't know any lines of poetry anyway. Instead, he followed her into her living room.

"Did you come inside before?" she asked, slipping out of her snow-covered jacket and hanging it carefully on a wooden hanger.

"Uh, yeah," he said. "How did you know?"

"The kitchen light is on," she said, waving an arm toward its glow.

"Oh," Mulder tried his best to curl his face into that cute-kid-caught-in-the-act grin, the one he knew was a winner, but Scully wasn't looking.

"I've got to get changed," she called over her shoulder as she ducked into the bedroom. "Sit down and get warm."

She returned in jeans and a sweater, her cheeks flushed from the weather, her hair hanging in pointy frozen spikes across her cheeks. She sat down facing him.

God she's beautiful, Mulder thought before he could comprehend the words. Here goes nothing.

"Where were you?" he asked.

Scully looked at her hands. "I, uh, I was at a banquet at Quantico."

"Oh really? What for?"

She looked up at him and some sort of laugh-sigh burst from her lips. "For me, actually. I, uh, I was given this commendation for this paper I wrote."

Mulder felt uncomprehendibly foolish. "Oh," he said.

"Were you really worried? I'm sorry if I scared you," her face spelled something between exhaustion and concern.

"No, no," Mulder began. "I just wanted to talk to you about the case, and I got a little nervous when you weren't answering your phone, so I came over."

"And sat outside my house for a half an hour," Scully put in.

Mulder laughed. "Yeah, okay. That too. Would you believe my car wouldn't start?"

"If you want me to believe it, sure," Scully said humorlessly. "But right now I'm really beat, and I have to get to bed soon. What was it you wanted to talk about?"

Mulder chewed his lip. His eyes hurt, and the heat hadn't kicked in in Scully's apartment yet and the bitter cold was doing nothing to stop his already trembling. "Why didn't you tell me about this award?"

"Oh. Um, I don't know. It was just a commendation. I didn't think it was a big deal." But she was looking away, now, and Mulder scanned her face for clarity.

"No big deal? Scully, they threw a banquet for you. You must have done something pretty terrific."

She looked at him, her face heavy. "Mulder. I'm sorry I didn't tell you, and I'm really sorry I scared you tonight. But I didn't tell you because this is my life, this is separate from the X-Files, separate from you, and I guess I just wanted to keep it that way."

"But why?" Mulder was insistent, now. Her face was betraying nothing, her demeanor ever-practical, ever-scientific.

"I don't know. Because I was afraid you'd find some way to make it yours, I think." Scully looked down. "Mulder, there's so little in my life that's my own, since I've been working with you. You have the X-Files; they're your life's work. I've got nothing, and usually that's fine, that's okay," she was speaking faster now, insistent that he didn't derive insult from what she was saying. He tried hard not to. "I mean, they're my life too," she continued, "and I care about them, and about your quests, but they're _your_ quests. I'm just tagging along. But this, being a doctor, this is all mine. This is something I do that you don't, this is a skill I have that you can't match. And I need that. And I need to keep it that way."

Mulder's brain whirled as her words breezed in. It would never have occurred to him to shut her out; it would never have occurred to him that she might try and shut him out. But here it was, plain and invasive and permanent. "Oh," he said. "Well, okay." He stood, ready to leave.

"Mulder, no," she said. "Look, I didn't want to offend you, and I really hope that you're not hurt by this, but I didn't want to lie to you." "But you did lie to me, Scully! If I hadn't been here tonight this whole thing would have passed and you would never have told me about it, right? Right?"

"Probably," she agreed. "But here you are, so I don't see why it's productive to bring that up."

"Why does it matter if it's _productive_?" Mulder demanded. "It's the truth, isn't it? And isn't that what it's all about? The truth?"

"Okay, Mulder," she said. "I'm sorry. But that's the way it is. That's the way I feel."

Mulder found himself curiously enraged. He looked down at her, sitting there, slender and tiny and gazing up at him with that superior smirk and he scanned the room for something to break.

"Look, I've got to go to sleep," she said, rising.

"No, Scully," he said with more force than he'd intended. "I, uh, I came over here to tell you something."

"Okay, tell me." She matched his direct, unwavering gaze.

Okay. Here I go.

"I was scared when you weren't answering your phone, when you didn't come back to the lab today. I was really, really scared, Scully. Not so much because I was afraid for what had happened to you, though, because I think I knew deep down you were fine, but this time because I was afraid for what had happened to me."

"What do you mean?" Scully had resigned to the conversation and was seated again; Mulder sat beside her on the couch and looked into her eyes for as long as he could stand it.

"I was lost. I was totally, completely ungrounded. I became completely ineffectual at the thought of going on without you -" the words were out of his mouth before he'd had time to consider them, consider their implications, "and that was terrifying. To think that I could be brought down so fast, so much. To think that I'd come to rely on you so heavily that I can't bear the thought of working a day without you."

Scully was rubbing her face with her hands. She was exhausted, Mulder could tell, completely exhausted and beaten and cold. But what he didn't expect, what threw him utterly and thoroughly was to see tears in her eyes when she looked up again. He reached out to touch her but she shook him away.

"Please don't," she said. "Mulder." She took a deep breath. "I can't handle that responsibility. I can't handle how inseparable we've become. I think that's, uh, I think that's part of why I didn't tell you about this thing at Quantico tonight. I wanted to see if I could do it without you."

"And you could," Mulder concluded with a brightness he didn't really feel, still shaken by the tears welling in her eyes.

"Yes, Mulder, I was fine. I'm fine. I do have my own life, my own talents, a whole world -" she illustrated with a sweeping arm, "that's separate from the X-Files. But then to come here and have you tell me..."

"I'm sorry," Mulder said, reaching for her hand which she offered, this time. "I didn't mean to dump all that on you. It's just been," he chuckled, exhaling, "it's, uh, it's been a long night."

"Yes it has," she agreed.

Mulder paused a moment, considering his words carefully. "Then maybe it's not so bad that we're so codependent. I mean, okay, that's a bad word to choose. But maybe, I mean, isn't it possible that we could actually make each other stronger?"

"I don't know," Scully said. "You tell me. You're the one who waited in the snow for a half an hour."

Mulder squeezed her hand tighter. Then he laughed. "Scully, what are we talking about, here?"

She laughed too, a short gulp-sob, and she blinked back tears. "I don't know anymore. I don't know."

"This is, I think this is a whole lot bigger than we're making it out to be," Mulder said.

"It's been a long time," Scully said finally. "We've worked together for six years. It's hard."

"It's, uh, It's something we don't really talk about, I mean, something we don't really address, I guess, is what I'm trying to say," Mulder's words tripped over themselves.

"What, our relationship?" Scully said. "No, we don't."

"Maybe we should," Mulder said. "It seems like, I don't know, we just have this routine, we have this shorthand and we can always just tell what's going on, but maybe it's not that simple."

"It's definitely not that simple," Scully said. "And that's okay, but I think it's worth it to bring it up at some point. But not tonight, Mulder. I'm tired. Really tired. I have to get some sleep. I have to think about this."

She got up from the couch again and Mulder followed suit. She walked him to the door.

"Scully," Mulder said, "I, uh..."

"What?" she asked.

His stomach was churning, hollow, his palms clammy. He felt singularly ugly and alone, was certain somehow that on the other side of her door was a chasm, was a dimension of nothingness, and once he stepped outside he'd be lost to it, he wouldn't have this moment again.

"I love you, Scully," the words tumbled out.

Her face registered something like terror for a moment, but it passed to be replaced with the far more terrifying look of calm concern.

"Okay, Mulder," she said, after a pause. "We'll deal with it."

Every bit of him was shaking as he processed her words. We'll deal with it.

"Are you going to be okay?" she asked.

He looked at the floor for a long moment, his heart splashing against his ribcage so loudly he was sure she could hear it. "Yeah, Scully, I'll be fine," he said.

"Okay," she said. She reached up, pulled him into an embrace. He kissed the top of her head, tasted shampoo, sweat, the bloody-metallic-ness of snow. He pressed his lips there for a long moment and then let her go, stepped backwards out the door.

"We'll talk, okay?" she said, softly.

"Okay," he said. "Good night, Scully."

"Good night, Mulder."

She smiled with her mouth and he saw himself for one last moment in her deep, tired eyes as she shut the door in front of him and he heard it lock between them. He stood in the hallway and stared at the empty, white expanse of door for a long moment before he turned toward the car to go home.


End file.
